Prep Comes to Cal

Written by PiE Team on Oct 28, 2013

On Friday October 25 the tables were reversed, and Prep students came to the UC Berkeley campus.

As a part of the college preparation unit, Prep students were brought to the UC Berkeley campus to get a taste of college life. The students spent the day touring the campus with the mentors, getting to see some of the school’s highlights: the T-Rex in VLSB, Upper Sproul plaza, Doe Library, among others. For many, it was their first trip up the Campanile. As a part of the tour, students got a taste of life on the engineering side of campus. They got to see the engineering work areas, such as the Hackerspace in Cory or the Civil Engineering work area in Davis; students also got to see some of the projects undergraduate engineers work on, such as the concrete canoe.

In addition to the campus tour, the students had a guest lecture by Terry Johnson, from the Bioengineering Department at UC Berkeley. Johnson’s talk highlighted what it meant to be someone in science or in engineering. He challenged the long-standing image of scientists and engineers as math geniuses with access to high-tech labs, stating that all it takes is curiosity and the drive to find solutions to problems.

And with this Prep students continue into the rest of the Prep season, an uncharted domain for their curiosity.